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Not all change is progress. Change comes with pros and cons. The pros need to outweigh the cons (and probably significantly so) for change to be considered pro

Not all change is progress. Change comes with pros and cons. The pros need to outweigh the cons (and probably significantly so) for change to be considered progress. Syntax highlighting has the pro of making code faster to visually parse for most people at the expense of some CPU cycles and a 10 second setting change for people for whom color variations are problematic. It doesn't take anything away. It's purely additive. AI code generation tools provide a dubious boost to short term productivity at the expense of extra work in the medium term and skill atrophy in the long term. My junior developers think I don't know they are using AI coding tools. I discovered it about 2 months into them doing it, and I've been tracking their productivity both before and after. In one case, one might be committing to the repository slightly more frequently. But in all cases, they still aren't completing assignments on time. Or at all. Even basic things have to be rewritten because they aren't suitable for purpose. And in our pair programming sessions, I see them frozen up now, where they weren't before they started using the tools. I can even see them habitually attempt to use the AI, but then remember I'm sitting with them, and halt. I tried to use AI code generation once to fill in some ASP.NET Core boilerplate for setting up authentication. Should be basic stuff. Should be 3 or 4 lines of code. I've done it before, but I forgot the exact lines and had been told AI was good for this kind of lazy recall of common tasks. It gave me a stub that had a comment inside, "implement authentication here". Tried to coax the AI into doing what I wanted and easily spent 10x more time than it would have taken to look up the documentation. And it still wasn't done. I haven't touched AI code gen since. So IDK. I'm very skeptical of the claims that AI is writing significant amounts of working code for people, or that it at all rivals even a moderately smart junior developer (say nothing of actually experienced senior). I think what's really happening is that people are spending a lot of time spinning the roulette wheel, always betting on 00, and then crowing they're a genius when it finally lands.

kamaal 2y ago
>>In one case, one might be committing to the repository slightly more frequently. But in all cases, they still aren't completing assignments on time. Most people are using it to finish work soon, rather than use it to do more work. As a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products. >>I can even see them habitually attempt to use the AI, but then remember I'm sitting with them, and halt. I understand you and I grew up in a different era. But life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. Things are only getting easier with time and have been like this for a few centuries. None of this is wrong. >>Tried to coax the AI into doing what I wanted and easily spent 10x more time than it would have taken to look up the documentation. Honestly this largely reads like how my dad would describe technology from the 2000s. It was always that he was better off without it. Whether that was true or false is up for debate, but the world was moving on.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  > life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. I don't see how AI is making life easier for my developers. You seem to have missed the point that I have seen no external sign of them being more productive. I don't care if they feel more productive. The end result is they aren't. But it does seem to be making life harder for them because they can't seem to think for themselves anymore. > a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products Well then, we're in agreement. I should reveal to my juniors that I know they are using AI and that they should stop immediately.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  > I understand you and I grew up in a different era. But life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. Of course not. But, eventually these young people are going to take over the systems that were built and understood by their ancestors. History shows what damage can be caused to a system when people who don't fully understand and appreciate how it was built take it over. We have to prepare them with the necessary knowledge to take over the future, which includes all the warts and shit piles. I mean, we've spent a lot of our careers trying to dig ourselves out of these shit piles because they suck so bad, but we never got rid of them, we just hid them behind some polish. But it's all still there, and vibe coders aren't going to be equipped to deal with it. Maybe the hope is that AI will reach god-like status and jut fix all of this for us magically one day, but that sounds like fixing social policy by waiting for the rapture, so we have to do something else to assure the future.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  > As a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products. I think you just hit the core point that splits people in these discussions. For many senior engineers, we see our jobs are to build better and more lasting products. Correctness, robustness, maintainability, consistency, clarity, efficiency, extensibility, adaptability. We're trying to build things that best serve our users, outperform our competition, enable effective maintenance, and include the design foresight that lets our efforts turn on a dime when conditions change while maintaining all these other benefits. I have never considered myself striving towards "newer and bigger" projects and I don't think any of the people I choose to work with would be able to say that either. What kind of goal is that? At best, that sounds like the prototyping effort of a confused startup that's desperately looking to catch a wave it might ride, and at worst it sounds like spam. I assure you, little of the software that you appreciate in your life has been built by senior engineers with that vision. It might have had some people involved at some stage who pushed for it, because that sort of vision can effectively kick a struggling project out of a local minimum (albeit sometimes to worse places), but it's unlikely to have been a seasoned "senior engineer" being the one making that push and (if they were) they surely weren't wearing that particular hat in doing so.
onion2k 2y ago
AI code generation tools provide a dubious boost to short term productivity at the expense of extra work in the medium term and skill atrophy in the long term. At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I'm very skeptical of the claims that AI is writing significant amounts of working code for people You may be right, but people write far too much code as it is. Software development should be about thinking more than typing. Maybe AI's most useful feature will be writing something that's slightly wrong in order to get devs to think about a good solution to their problem and then they can just fix the AI's code. If that results in better software then it's a huge win worth billions of dollars. The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid.
- moron4hire 2y ago
  > At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I am extremely skeptical that LLM-based generative AI running in silicon-based digital computers will improve to a significant degree over what we have today. Ever. GPT-2 to GPT-3 was a sea change improvement, but every since then, new models are really only incrementally improving, despite taking exponentially more power and compute to train. Coupled with the fact that processor are only getting wider, not faster, or less energy consuming, then without an extreme change in computing technology, we aren't getting there with LLMs. Either the processors or the underlying AI tech need to change, and there is no evidence this is the case. > The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid. I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way?
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    Same. I've heard that this area is improving exponentially for years now, but I can't really say the results I'm getting are any better than I originally experienced with ChatGTP. The dev tooling has gotten better; I use the integrated copilot every day and it saves me from writing a lot of boilerplate. But it's not really replacing me as a coder. Yeah I can go further faster. I can fill in gaps in knowledge. Mostly, I don't have to spend hours on forums and stack overflow anymore trying to work out an issue. But it's not replacing me because I still have to make fine-grained decisions and corrections along the way. To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.

kamaal 2y ago

>>In one case, one might be committing to the repository slightly more frequently. But in all cases, they still aren't completing assignments on time. Most people are using it to finish work soon, rather than use it to do more work. As a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products. >>I can even see them habitually attempt to use the AI, but then remember I'm sitting with them, and halt. I understand you and I grew up in a different era. But life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. Things are only getting easier with time and have been like this for a few centuries. None of this is wrong. >>Tried to coax the AI into doing what I wanted and easily spent 10x more time than it would have taken to look up the documentation. Honestly this largely reads like how my dad would describe technology from the 2000s. It was always that he was better off without it. Whether that was true or false is up for debate, but the world was moving on.

moron4hire 2y ago
> life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. I don't see how AI is making life easier for my developers. You seem to have missed the point that I have seen no external sign of them being more productive. I don't care if they feel more productive. The end result is they aren't. But it does seem to be making life harder for them because they can't seem to think for themselves anymore. > a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products Well then, we're in agreement. I should reveal to my juniors that I know they are using AI and that they should stop immediately.
ModernMech 2y ago
> I understand you and I grew up in a different era. But life getting easier for the young isnt exactly something we must resent. Of course not. But, eventually these young people are going to take over the systems that were built and understood by their ancestors. History shows what damage can be caused to a system when people who don't fully understand and appreciate how it was built take it over. We have to prepare them with the necessary knowledge to take over the future, which includes all the warts and shit piles. I mean, we've spent a lot of our careers trying to dig ourselves out of these shit piles because they suck so bad, but we never got rid of them, we just hid them behind some polish. But it's all still there, and vibe coders aren't going to be equipped to deal with it. Maybe the hope is that AI will reach god-like status and jut fix all of this for us magically one day, but that sounds like fixing social policy by waiting for the rapture, so we have to do something else to assure the future.
swatcoder 2y ago
> As a senior engineer your job must not be to stop the use of LLMs, but create opportunities to build newer and bigger products. I think you just hit the core point that splits people in these discussions. For many senior engineers, we see our jobs are to build better and more lasting products. Correctness, robustness, maintainability, consistency, clarity, efficiency, extensibility, adaptability. We're trying to build things that best serve our users, outperform our competition, enable effective maintenance, and include the design foresight that lets our efforts turn on a dime when conditions change while maintaining all these other benefits. I have never considered myself striving towards "newer and bigger" projects and I don't think any of the people I choose to work with would be able to say that either. What kind of goal is that? At best, that sounds like the prototyping effort of a confused startup that's desperately looking to catch a wave it might ride, and at worst it sounds like spam. I assure you, little of the software that you appreciate in your life has been built by senior engineers with that vision. It might have had some people involved at some stage who pushed for it, because that sort of vision can effectively kick a struggling project out of a local minimum (albeit sometimes to worse places), but it's unlikely to have been a seasoned "senior engineer" being the one making that push and (if they were) they surely weren't wearing that particular hat in doing so.

onion2k 2y ago

AI code generation tools provide a dubious boost to short term productivity at the expense of extra work in the medium term and skill atrophy in the long term. At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I'm very skeptical of the claims that AI is writing significant amounts of working code for people You may be right, but people write far too much code as it is. Software development should be about thinking more than typing. Maybe AI's most useful feature will be writing something that's slightly wrong in order to get devs to think about a good solution to their problem and then they can just fix the AI's code. If that results in better software then it's a huge win worth billions of dollars. The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid.

moron4hire 2y ago
> At the moment, sure. They've only been available for about 5 minutes in the grand scheme of dev tools. If you believe that AI assistants are going to be put back in the box then you are just flat out wrong. They'll improve significantly. I am extremely skeptical that LLM-based generative AI running in silicon-based digital computers will improve to a significant degree over what we have today. Ever. GPT-2 to GPT-3 was a sea change improvement, but every since then, new models are really only incrementally improving, despite taking exponentially more power and compute to train. Coupled with the fact that processor are only getting wider, not faster, or less energy consuming, then without an extreme change in computing technology, we aren't getting there with LLMs. Either the processors or the underlying AI tech need to change, and there is no evidence this is the case. > The belief that AI is worthless unless it's writing the code that a good dev would write is a trap that you should avoid. I have no idea what you're even trying to say but this. Is this some kind of technoreligion that thinks AGI is worth the endeavor regardless of the harm that comes to people along the way?
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Same. I've heard that this area is improving exponentially for years now, but I can't really say the results I'm getting are any better than I originally experienced with ChatGTP. The dev tooling has gotten better; I use the integrated copilot every day and it saves me from writing a lot of boilerplate. But it's not really replacing me as a coder. Yeah I can go further faster. I can fill in gaps in knowledge. Mostly, I don't have to spend hours on forums and stack overflow anymore trying to work out an issue. But it's not replacing me because I still have to make fine-grained decisions and corrections along the way. To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla. And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.